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In a strange twist, real estate agents are not bound to advertise under their broker's brand. This means an agent can invent any brand he or she wants, while remaining an agent of the broker. Home Docket was one of them DSMM branded.
Working in and around land development, I witnessed the power fluctuations between the many stakeholders circling the waters as the market wavered, and then tanked. Private investors rose to replace difficult banks, builders started buying their own land, architects started contracting and Realtors started land prospecting more aggressively. One of those was a spunky team from Windermere.
Though holding ambition, they had no brand. So DSMM went to work, and came up with the sticky concept of Home Docket. Soft yet slightly edgy, memorable, short and with an available URL, it set up quickly.
Design aside, the real trick with these guys was the incredibly tight timelines between project completions and open houses.
For example, a build can go on for months, but when the last bit of dust is swept from the floor, say, on a Wednesday, the place is staged with furniture and plastic fruit on Thursday, photographed on Friday and people are moving through by Saturday. The guys wanted print materials in hand for the open houses, and not the generic stuff provided by the brokers, but DSMM stuff.
Best case scenario, I was taking the pictures because I could edit in HDR immediately afterward and have images on hand same day. And with a sweet relationship with a great printer, this meant I could have design done and a morning print turnaround to have materials at open houses before the doors opened.
But wait, there's more. Instead of just having digitally printed 6x7 cards, the two top images below are offset printed high quality paper sleeves with the evergreen branding and contact info. The inserts fit inside and an even better, classier package went into home buyer's hands.
Everyone has received that grey-looking letter begging for them to sell their homes. Do they ever get read? So what we did was change things up by showing the benefit of selling old homes and letting home owners think it over. The double fold piece looked great in anyone's mail pile.
Hundreds if not thousands were printed and mailed. This is where DSMM learned a lesson. According to Home Docket, if even a single piece turned into a sale, it would be considered a win.
This wasn't the only decent effort DSMM put toward prospecting, and not even sure if it was the first. But it was the best thanks in large part to artist Stacy Hsu.
Pursuing investors is important these days in development, so we created a pretty comprehensive guide to Home Dockets modus, and updated it yearly.
And finally, this is one of a few clients who also liked the idea of ditching the hanging breadboard sign for a more elegant answer.
These metal sign frames were fabricated in Capitol Hill of angle iron, and at a 60 degree angle, was able to snag driver's attention from either direction, and aged well in the soggy Seattle weather.